Nivea Makes Us Ask Again: Why Is It So Hard to Make Non-Racist Ads?

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Nivea Makes Us Ask Again: Why Is It So Hard to Make Non-Racist Ads?

If the advertising profession had its own equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, it would go something like this: “First, do not offend the person whose money you’re trying to get.” This being America, you could safely add “…especially with anything that might come across as racist or racially insensitive, since we’re all hyper-attuned to that kind of thing over here.”

Somehow, though, the handsomely compensated geniuses of Madison Avenue keep having trouble satisfying that rather simple-sounding mandate. The latest failure is an ad from Nivea instructing its target consumer, a notional black male, to “Re-Civilize Yourself” by trimming his bushy hair and shaving off his beard. Hmm, where have we heard language like that before? Oh, that’s right: 400 years of colonialism and slavery. Beiersdorf USA, which owns Nivea, has apologized for the ad, created by Draftfcb.

At least they have company in their shame. Just a few weeks ago, Summer’s Eve had to ditch a campaign that starred talking vagina hands with stereotyped ethnic personas. Confused by the previous sentence? The douche maker has pulled the spots all from YouTube, but you can watch them here.

Then there was a misguided ad that accidentally implied that Dove body wash can help black and Latina women achieve the smooth, even skin tone of a white person. That one, at least, seemed to be a genuine oversight rather than an instance of colossal bad judgment.

The irony here is that all of this represents progress, albeit in perverted form. Marketers are now taking pains to reach out to minority (and, yes, we do need a better term) consumers they were once content to ignore. Now it’s time for the ad industry to fix its well documented diversity problem so that next time some too-clever copywriter comes up with a campaign that puckishly plays on stereotypes or speaks to hypothetical urban or ethnic consumers “in their own voice,” there will be someone in the room who can tell him how bad his idea actually is.